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Summer Task Reading List Summer Task Reading List: Peter Ackroyd The Great Fire of Spenser Spender wants to make a film of Dickens' "Little Dorrit" using a contemporary London prison as a London set. But he is not the only person interested in Dickens. Unwittingly he becomes the catalyst for bizarre meetings, coincidences and events, culminating in an apocalyptic conflagration. Monica Ali Brick Lane Still in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man who is twenty years older. Away from the mud and heat of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block in London's East End. Nazneen knows not a word of English, and is forced to depend on her husband. But unlike him she is practical and wise, and befriends a fellow Asian girl Razia, who helps her understand the strange ways of her adopted new British home. Martin Amis London Fields A black comic, murder mystery novel. Regarded as possibly Amis' strongest novel, the tone gradually shifts from high comedy, interspersed with deep personal introspections, to a dark sense of foreboding and eventually panic at the approach of the deadline, or "horror day", the climactic scene alluded to on the first page. Martin Amis Time’s Arrow, Time's Arrow tells the story, backwards, of the life of Nazi war criminal, Doctor Tod T. Friendly. He dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home...Escaping from the body of the dying doctor who had worked in Nazi concentration camps, the doctor's consciousness begins living the doctor's life backwards JG Ballard Empire of the Sun Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy’s life in Japanese- occupied wartime Shanghai – a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the author’s own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the twentieth century will be not only remembered but judged. Iain Banks The Wasp Factory Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his father outsIde a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly. Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself and her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women and minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, and her chance to escape from a life of humiliating spinsterhood is renewed. Anthony A Clockwork A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of Burgess Orange exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters. Fifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean? Angela Carter The Bloody From familiar fairy tales and legends - Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, Chamber vampires and werewolves - Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories. Raymond The Big Sleep - A hardboiled crime novel, the first to feature the detective Philip Marlowe. Set in Los Angeles, the story is Chandler noted for its complexity, with characters double-crossing one another and secrets being exposed throughout the narrative. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness Conrad's narrator Marlow, a seaman and wanderer, recounts his physical and psychological journey in search of the infamous ivory trader Kurtz: dying, insane, and guilty of unspeakable atrocities. Travelling upriver to the heart of the African continent, he gradually becomes obsessed by this enigmatic, wraith-like figure. Marlow's discovery of how Kurtz has gained his position of power over the local people involves him in a radical questioning, not only of his own nature and values, but also those of western civilisation. The inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar-winning film Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness is a quintessentially modernist work exploring the limits of human experience and the nightmarish realities of imperialism. Seamus Deane Reading in the The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed young Irish Catholic boy living in a poor area of Dark Derry. This novel-in-stories is about both the boy's coming of age and the Troubles of Northern Ireland, from the partition of the island in the early 1920s until July 1971, just after the violent Battle of the Bogside took place in Derry. The Derry of poet Seamus Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark is a perilous place. Ghosts haunt the stairwells of apartment buildings, a curse follows two families down through the generations, close friends turn out to be police informers and the police are as likely to persecute an innocent man as protect him. Daniel Defoe Moll Flanders The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders Who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Years a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her brother) Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest and died a Penitent. Charles Bleak House A complex mystery story and an unforgettable indictment of an indifferent society. Its representations of a Dickens great city's underworld, and of the law's corruption and delay, draw upon the author's personal knowledge and experience. Sebastian Engleby The story of Mike Engleby, a working-class boy who wins a place at an esteemed English university. But with Faulks the disappearance of Jennifer, the undergraduate Engleby admires from afar, the story turns into a mystery of gripping power. Sebastian Faulks's new novel is a bolt from the blue, unlike anything he has ever written before: contemporary, demotic, heart-wrenching - and funny, in the deepest shade of black. F. Scott The Great Gatsby For eighty dollars a month, Carraway finds himself the unlikely neighbour of his beautiful cousin Daisy Fitzgerald Buchannan and a mysterious millionaire - Jay Gatsby. From the shadow of Gatsby's mansion, Carraway is drawn into the glittering, captivating world of the wealthy - their parties, their love affairs, and their lies. And as he watches his new friends, he writes their story. A tale of roaring excess, impossible love and the devastating, tragic consequences. Michael Frayn Spies In the quiet cul-de-sac where Keith and Stephen live the only immediate signs of the Second World War are the blackout at night and a single random bombsite. But the two boys suspect that the comfortably ordinary houses in the Close and their inhabitants are not what they seem. As Keith, the leader in all their enterprises, authoritatively informs the trusting Stephen, the whole district is riddled with secret passages and underground laboratories - hideaways for any number of murderers, unsung war heroes and secret agents. William The Spire The Spire: Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His Golding mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darker on the world below, and on Dean Jocelin in particular. Mohsin Hamid The At a cafe table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk Reluctant deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful encounter Changez is living an Fundamentalist immigrant s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite valuation firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. In the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past.
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